I can't believe I just did it. I ponyed up $30 for Salon premium services. I must be out of my mind. I only contribute to public radio once every 6 years, and only if I'm flush. The things you do at midnight when your Kix are stale...
We had to do a our own poetry canon for Form and Theory of Poetry in my MFA program, and it is an interesting intellectual exercise, you know? I like the discipline it puts you through. And from learning to deconstruct canons even as I noticed all the profs still privileged primary texts in grad school (somehow "practice what you preach" doesn't apply to grad school faculty and candidacy exams; go figure), the idea of a postmodern film canon just laughs out loud with irony. So what the hell. Let's see where I match wits with the Salon A&E editor.
Forty movies every film fan should see. Are you cinematically literate? Salon's A&E editor picks the best and most influential movies of all time. [Salon.com]
I can relate to the writer's dilemma:
You wind up having to make ludicrous choices, which aren't even comparisons between apples and oranges, but something more like apples and hyenas, or apples and aircraft carriers. I decided to do 20 films in each of two categories: movies you'd darn well better have seen already, and movies that I suspect you might not get around to without my benevolent interference. On the first list, I ended up somehow trying to decide between "Singin' in the Rain" and "Night of the Living Dead." (They, um, must have some similarities -- in both of them the dialogue pretty much sucks!)
[...]
The 20 Movies You'd Better Have Seen Already
[...]
"Battleship Potemkin" (directed by Grigori Aleksandrov and Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) Enough said. If this crucial Soviet propaganda silent -- in which Eisenstein invented much of the language of modern cinema -- wasn't the first thing they showed you in that undergrad film class at Bedrock State, return your diploma and get a refund.
OK, I don't care about bitchfights in 'All About Eve,' so that's cool. But here's a film I haven't seen, not in my undergraduate film class at Bedrock State, or as the grader for several different profs while in grad school at PoMo Tech U. How have I lived so long and not seen Eisenstein? OK, I best suck this one up and watch it. A war movie? Fuck.
"Blade Runner" (directed by Ridley Scott, 1982) The movie that invented the future. Been to Times Square lately?
Can I get a witness? I show this one in every freshman writing/survey course I have taught. So there!
"Blue Velvet" (written and directed by David Lynch, 1986) I saw the best minds of my generation pining, nay, virtually (and in some cases literally) dying for a work of art that captured the perversions and contradictions beneath the surface of the "morning in America" go-go Reagan era. This was that work. Certain things about the "Blue Velvet" aesthetic may seem hackneyed today (thanks to endless and often hapless imitation), but nothing this dark, this hallucinatory or this extreme had been seen in mainstream American cinema since, well, ever.
I won't forget the moment I saw that opening EAR. I was trying to clean house, passing from one room to another about 2 feet in front of the TV screen. I sat down on the edge of an end table and didn't move again until the end. At least I didn't leave the vacuum cleaner running. But I couldn't put this film on my list. I am most definitely a fan of Lynch, the twisted fuck. BIG fan. "Wild at Heart" was easier to watch (Diane Ladd is a goddess puking with lipstick, god she is so cool). But "Mulholland Drive" blows all other Lynch films away, even the corpus of Twin Peaks. So what if it isn't emblematic of the 80s. If I wanted something emblematic of the 80s, I'd have picked "Boogie Nights," but I won't cuz it gives me bad flashbacks [VBG].
"Casablanca" (directed by Michael Curtiz, 1942) "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine." The best-loved movie romance ever made.
Yeah, I'll give that a witness from the Amen corner.
"Chinatown" (directed by Roman Polanski, 1974) I didn't get this creepily brilliant neo-noir -- which introduced the genre to the post-Vietnam generation -- about capitalism, water and Los Angeles when I first saw it as a teenager. I still thought America could be redeemed.
Along with Eisenstein, I am functionally illiterate on Polanski. "Chinatown" will do to remedy that. I've picked up the box in Blockbuster a dozen times. Poke poke!
"Citizen Kane" (directed by Orson Welles, 1941) What am I supposed to say here? By international consensus, the greatest movie ever made. (And, along with "Battleship Potemkin," the foundation of the Great Director legend.)
I like it fine, but is anybody but me sick to fucking death of all the genuflecting in front of this film? Of course they are. Call us back in 20 years when we are sick of being sick of it, and then we might like it again.
"Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" (directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1964) Confession: I don't love "Dr. Strangelove." I've always found its political satire grating and Peter Sellers' performance(s) irritatingly over the top. (Although, as in all Kubrick, the filmmaking is terrific.) Maybe you had to be there, in a world many rational people believed was about to be blown to smithereens by dueling packs of idiots. But there's no denying it shaped the sensibility -- and sense of humor -- of generations to come.
I was prepared to love this writer for putting the best Kubrick film up the highest, but they he disowns it in the next breath. Bummer dude. I find myself still living inside this sense of humor. More than that. We are LIVING this damned life. Dr Strangelove is alive and living inside the Bush administration. What would we do if the film hadn't come along first to help us see it so clearly? Vera Lynn and Slim Pickens. Even Pink Floyd, The Wall. "We'll meet again some sunny day." It just doesn't get any better than this.
"The Godfather" and "The Godfather: Part II" (directed by Francis Ford Coppola, 1972 and 1974) Not just the gold standard of gangster cinema but also the greatest drama of American immigration and assimilation ever made. Don Corleone's grandchildren include not just Tony Soprano but also Suge Knight and Tupac Shakur.
I was never a Godfather FAN, like raving fan, until just this past year, even with it being shown in those vast film lectures I had to grade for. I never liked young Pacino either until fairly recently. This is sick, but I think he is hot in those movies where he's an impossible older guy who rants and raves. When Pacino rants and raves as a middle aged man, I'd just jump his bones in a heartbeat. So the quiet, arrogant young Pacino, the intense eyes but little guy face, didn't do a thing for me. I avoided his movies for years.
Even just last month tho, I sat and watched the VH-1 and Bravo versions over and over, learning the dialogue like I can say lines of Hamlet along with the play. It was working on me. It got under my skin and just decided to live there. On the Sights and Sounds site, I picked this one that is really two for number ONE.
"Jaws" (directed by Steven Spielberg, 1975) The invention of the summer-event blockbuster, which has never been done better. I saw it at the mall with my mom, who grabbed hold of my arm and wouldn't let go, leaving fingernail bruises that took a week to heal. (Fortunately, I didn't see any girls I knew.) Oh, and seeing the movie in bits and pieces on TNT (which goes through phases of showing nothing else) doesn't count.
Nope, I wouldn't pick this one for anything. The opening scene, maybe. My best memories of "Jaws?" I was in junior high and conned my mom into signing a permission slip so I could check the book out of the adult section of the library and found myself reading my first ever sex scenes. Ah, junior high.
"Lawrence of Arabia" (directed by David Lean, 1962) No seeing this one on TV, either. A wide-screen entertainment like no other, and proof that an eye-popping visual spectacle doesn't have to be brainless crapola.
Loved the DVD Letterbox, which was the first time I saw it. Loved the queer undertones. That wasn't no subtext, no way. And Peter O'Toole. I've thought he was a hottie for a long time. Very very cool movie. Definitely high up on my list. A photographer has to love this film.
"Nashville" (directed by Robert Altman, 1975) Altman's sprawling, interlocking saga of Music City is the great work of American film's great improviser and became a crucial shaping force on the various independent-film rebellions of the '80s and '90s. (Hello, Paul Thomas Anderson.)
I missed this one, I should be embarrassed to say, as "The Player" would be what I'd put in this spot. "Short Cuts" is great. Sorry to say I bought the "MASH" video a few years back and it didn't age as I thought it would. The sexism drove me crazy. I was a BIG Donald Sutherland fan back years ago. God those doctors came off as assholes. Painless, all that. It just didn't work as well. But I know "Nashville" is the brilliant one (more brilliant than The Player?) and it is on my list too.
"The Seven Samurai" (directed by Akira Kurosawa, 1954) I'd actually rather sit through "Yojimbo," "Throne of Blood," "High and Low" or "The Bad Sleep Well." But every subsequent movie dealing with masculine honor and violence, from Sam Peckinpah to Coppola, Scorsese and John Woo, owes an immeasurable debt to Kurosawa's majestic, marvelously composed trademark film.
Uh. lessee, if this stands for Kurosawa, I'm screwed again. I like "Ran" the best. Color in it is beautiful. I watched "Rashomon" on Criterion edition DVD just a week ago, for the first time. It is cool, copied all over, neat with the sun and the landscape, even a little sexy, but all that layers of reality and relativity? That is just SO pre-PoMo. Did anyone ever doubt that there was not truth?
But besides that, if I had to pick "Seven Samarai" to place this highly, I'd have to pick "Seventh Seal" by Bergman too, and Bergman has lots better. "Persona," for instance, to go with "Mulholland Drive, "Cries and Whispers." "Fanny and Alexander" is a great film, but a bit long and tortured.
And I'd pick Woody Allen's "Die Duve" over "Wild Strawberries" any day.
Kurosawa is the best visually on the whole list.
"Forty Films Everyone Should See"
Persona" (written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, 1966) Has the cinematic breakthrough represented by "Persona" been so abused by generations of TV commercials and music videos that it now appears trite? People whose taste I generally respect think so, but that point of view is simply impossible for me. I first saw "Persona" in a college film series around 1980 and could hardly sleep afterward. The hard-edged psychological realism in the relationship between nurse Bibi Andersson and the mute (or is she?) psychiatric patient Liv Ullmann, combined with the pomo film-history explosion in the middle of the movie, blew my mind worse than any drugs I've ever had before or since. I went back to see it the next night and the night after that. A friend of mine used to check out a print from the Baltimore public library every weekend and project it against his bedroom wall. "L'Avventura," "Last Year in Marienbad" and "Pierrot le fou" had already done considerable damage to the boundary between narrative and experimental film, but after "Persona" it would never be convincingly rebuilt. (For some unimaginable reason "Persona" isn't available on DVD, and even the VHS cassette is pretty hard to find.)
"Mulholland Drive" is part of the reason why "Persona" is not trite. I saw "Persona" in 1981 and had the very same reaction above. Plus, the eroticism just oozed off the screen. Bibi wants me! Bibi and Naomi Watts. Oooh yeah. The erotic dimension works the same way as the two women blur into each other. I wish I could get "Persona" on DVD. I need both films.
Do I put a Hitchcock film on my list? Not "Vertigo," I don't think. But which one? And what about more recent stuff, like "Memento?" Something seems terribly missing. I'm dissatisfied with my canon so far. Let's see if the author tells me what I've left out. "Gods & Monsters?" I couldn't live without that one. It is under my skin like the Godfathers. "Thelma and Louise?" Back on my Ridley Scott kick. A guy in California told me once that Ridley Scott was an asshole. I tend to like assholes, which is the more pitiful thing.
"Triumph of the Will" has to be on my list too, because I am in love with photography. "Olympiad" or what it is called may be better visually, but less coherent. Also, "Triumph of the Will" holds up a model for us just as surely as "Dr Strangelove" does. It is referenced everywhere from cartoons to Ridley Scott's "Gladiator."
My list must have camp on it too, since I'm a student of camp. "Reefer Madness?" "Brother From Another Planet?" No, for that honor, it can only be... "Evil Dead," hell, the whole trilogy. Sam Raimi is rich as shit right now, so he can bite me [G]. I have to put "Blair Witch" on this part of the list too, for sheer conceit and POV vision. So rich. See, why would the author put "Night of the Living Dead" on his list when Raimi and "Blair Witch" clearly belong there? "Rocky Horror" too. I'd have lots more musicals on here, but my love of show tunes is mostly a guilty pleasure or fixation on Julie Andrews.
I need a surrealist too. I can't spell it tho. It means "And Illusion Dog." I just love the razor slashing over the eyeball as the cloud goes across the moon. I will never forget it. En Chen Andalou? I am spelling it wrong.
I need a Terry Gilliam film on my list too. Which one? I watch "12 Monkeys" over and over, but I think "Brazil" is a better film. Even so, there is no rival for "Life of Brian," so it gets to hold this spot. Add "Young Frankenstein" for the genius of Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder.
While I'm in the neighborhood of quirky narratives, don't forget one of my all time favorites, "My Life as a Dog," and "Billy Eliot." They are both more recent ones that need to be in my canon.
"Stagecoach" (directed by John Ford, 1939) It's become fashionable in critical circles to bash Ford in general and this stagy (har, har) ensemble drama in particular. With the western in near-total eclipse as a genre, they might not have shown "Stagecoach" in that undergrad film class of yours, and it's a shame. If Ford's filmmaking combined the cornball optimism and thoughtless racism of his country, is that really his fault? It's a richly engaging tale, effortlessly and economically shot (at just 96 minutes), that introduced most of the character and scenery tropes that would define the western. And it launched bluff, agreeable John Wayne on his iconic trajectory. As for Ford himself: Give me a break. Sure, his politics are fatally confused and he was no great intellect, but people will still be watching "The Grapes of Wrath," "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," "My Darling Clementine," "The Quiet Man," "Rio Grande" and "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" when the films of Antonioni and Alain Resnais are decaying digital data in the basement of history.
I did see "Stagecoach" in that undergraduate film class, happily so, along with "Grapes of Wrath," but Maureen O'Hara in "The Quiet Man" is still the most satisfying to me.
Still some are missing. Maybe I will remember them when I'm not thinking of it. It is a good start.
Miasma
3:04:05 AM 
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